What steps must one take to ensure that an otherwise defaultly-configured InnoDB server is truly ACID compliant? The InnoDB configuration page mentions that the hardware itself must be configured to honor fsync calls, i.e. disable any write-back caches.

This page mentions some other concerns, but may be conflating the binary log and the InnoDB log, and may be a bit out of date regarding default settings for MySQL 5.x.

Upon reading the binary log document page it would seem that the "sync_binlog=1" setting is not required for ACID properties in general, only for ACID properties vis a vis point-in-time recovery and replication.

So, is disabling write-back disk caching sufficient, or are there other settings that must be tweaked?

Disabling write-back isn't necessarily going to break ACID. It won't do so if you have battery-backed write cache on your RAID controller, and the payoff for having that is a huge increase in write capacity. Something to beware of though is that some hard drives and SSDs (e.g. intel X-25) have their own write back caches that are NOT battery backed even if your RAID controller is and they definitely need disabling. Setting O_DIRECT will also keep your OS and file system out of the way and let the RAID controller do its thing more effectively.